Catalogue of Trees
Words and Music
As spring approaches, Emma Fielding and Julian Rhind-Tutt read a selection of texts inspired by trees. Authors include Edmund Spenser, John Clare, Amy Levy and Roger Deakin, with music from Grieg to Sibelius, Art Tatum to Radiohead.
Music Played
Words and Music: Catalogue of Trees
Producer’s Note
With Easter comes spring, and a good time to reflect on the ancient living structures that provide food and shelter, hope and solace, grimly persisting in the harshest conditions. Trees have been a constant source of inspiration for English language poets, as illustrated here in writing from Edmund Spenser to Seamus Heaney. Most of the texts focus on individual trees, covering a range of species including fir, yew, elm, plane, cherry, oak, birch and maple. There are just three passages of prose: two are from David George Haskell’s The Songs of Trees, a study in bioacoustics which includes one attempt by the author to wire a callery pear in the busy streets of Manhattan; the other is from the closing pages of Roger Deakin’s Wildwood in which the writer describes in detail the spring regeneration of the ash tree by his home in Suffolk.
Trees provide the imagery for some of the songs: Schubert’s lime tree, a setting of Wilhelm Müller’s Der Lindenbaum from the Winterreise cycle, the East Lothian yew tree of Dick Gaughan’s historical ballad, and Billie Holiday’s powerful recording of Strange Fruit in which the victims of lynchings hang from the poplars of the American south. Other music reflects the mood of the texts: the slow, interweaving lines of Stravinsky’s Double Canon follows an excerpt from Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H.; the title and otherworldly texture of Radiohead’s Treefingers resonates with the “curled sleeping fingers” of W.S.Merwin’s Elegy for a Walnut Tree; the “passionate wind of spring” in Amy Levy’s The Birch Tree at Loschwitz is echoed in the third movement of Sibelius’s Symphony No.5, said to have been inspired by a spring-time sighting of swans in flight through the Finnish countryside; finally the plucked and bowed sounds of Ravel’s String Quartet in F become the woody bed for Spenser’s expansive catalogue of trees from the Fairie Queene.
Producer, Felix Carey
BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, Catalogue of Trees
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